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I'm sitting in a hotel room in Atlanta right now, fresh off a full day of educational sessions at the Healthy Trucking Association of America's Health Trucking Summit. It's been a long day, so forgive me if my thoughts are a little, well, all over the place. But I did want to share a few personal reflections from the day.
The most frequently recurring thought today has been the impression that there really are people who ...

The past few times I’ve been to the doctor’s office my blood pressure has been higher than it should be — not good given that I’m only in my late 20s and have a family history of high blood pressure. I’ve always struggled with weight, but I’ve never really struggled with health until now. It’s hard for me to ignore the fact that my higher-than-normal blood pressure is likely directly related to my weight ...

Humor mag The Onion is known for picking apart the news of the day, and the news business, in often satirically cutting fashion -- in a story published years ago in its pages it ran a picture of an orange-jumpsuited prisoner wearing a crown of thorns with the headline "Christ kills two in abortion-clinic bombing." It picked up on the ironies inherent in last week's ban on the practice of texting while driving in this faux man-on-the-street series ...

Though it's unclear how exactly this is a safety-improvement motivator, Randy Cornell, safety VP with Joplin, Mo.-based Con-way Truckload, sky-dived from 10,000 feet after the fleet's drivers met a safety challenge to get its "accident rate down by a creditable 34 percent in just five years," as reported at HandyShippingGuide.com and elsewhere. "The figure equates to less than 8 accidents per million miles driven according to the company’s strict definition -- any incident when a truck connects with people or property and ...

The Missouri-based Daily Dunklin Democrat newspaper once again featured a driver I had the pleasure of meeting in Nashville late last year. Campbell, Mo.-based Double G Trucking hauler Larry Morris's "Cotton Fields to Nashville" song was selected as the title track for a Johnny Cash tribute record, a coproduction of TRS Music Group and Plush Records. The companies' heads, A.J. Siegler and Charlie Ray, respectively, showed up unexpectedly at Morris's Campbell home to present him ...

Though the writer played it as an example of distracted driving, could it be an argument for more flexibility in the hours of service? Whatever the case, given today's news that a nationwide texting-while-driving ban is in the offing, I guess it couldn't be helped that Joseph Rose of the Oregonian newspaper wrote on the Hard Drive blog of 45-year-old Los Angeles-based trucker Andrew Quintero's accident on I-5. Quintero's truck and trailer crossed the median and came to rest ...